Lena Dunham was interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air today about her book, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned,” (Random House; RH Audio). Listen to the interview here.

Tomorrow, she will appear on  ABC’s Good Morning America, followed by the Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Wednesday.

Holds are rising rapidly in libraries on modest ordering. Holds are also rising on the audio, which Dunham narrates.

Adam Driver appears in two movies adapted from books this weekend. Getting the most promotion is the one based on Jonathan Tropper’s comic family novel, This Is Where I Leave You, (Penguin/Dutton, 2009), also starring Tina Fey, Jason Bateman and Jane Fonda.

The other, Tracks, is based on the 1980 memoir by Australian Robyn Davidson of her solo trip through the outback. It may not be getting the same level of promotion, but it ranks at #4 in the week’s People Picks, while This Is Where I Leave You  is at #10.

In the film, Mia Wasikowska plays Robyn and Driver, the real-life National Geographic photographer Rick Smolan, who took stunning photos of the journey. Smolan talks about that project in the following interview.and how eerie it was to go on set with Robyn, who is still a friend, and watch the actors recreate their younger selves.

Those who remember the heady days of CD-Rom may also remember that Smolan’s 1992 book, From Alice to Ocean included the first CD-Rom for the general public. That book is about to be re-released, with updated technology. Readers can point their smart phones at the photos to see how each scene plays out in the movie.

Inside Tracks : Robyn Davidson’s Solo Journey Across the Outback
Rick Smolan
Against All Odds Productions (Sterling) October 21, 2014

Davidson’s book, which is still available in trade paperback, has also been released as a tie-in:

Tracks (Movie Tie-in Edition): A Woman’s Solo Trek Across 1700 Miles of Australian Outback
Robyn Davidson
RH/Vintage: August 26, 2014

With the release of the first trailer for the movie Rosewater,  we now have a glimpse of what Jon Stewart was up to when he went on hiatus from the Daily Show last summer to direct his first movie.

The movie is based on a book Then They Came For Me by Maziar Bahari, (Random House, 2011; Tantor Audio), the author’s account of his imprisionment in Iran, in part because of a Daily Show piece.

Variety gives the film a rave:

“The punishing ordeal of Iranian journalist Maziar Bahari — imprisoned for 118 days on charges of espionage — is brought to the screen with impressive tact and intelligence by writer-director Jon Stewart in Rosewater, an alternately somber and darkly funny drama that may occupy the same geographic terrain as Argo (to which it will inevitably be compared), but in most other respects could hardly be more different.

The Hollywood Reporter‘s reviewer, however, is not so impressed, saying, “if this very same film had been made by an unknown director, it would pass in the night with only scant notice.”

The tables are now being turned on Stewart, as he begins to promote his own film. The Hollywood Reporter is his first stop, with a cover interview (too bad about that review). On his own show on Thursday night, he presented two new clips.

The movie opens in theaters on Nov. 7.

Tie-in:

Rosewater: A Family’s Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival
Maziar Bahari, Aimee Molloy, Jon Meacham (Foreword by)
Random House Trade Paperbacks October 21, 2014

The trailer for a new adaptation of Vera Brittain’s classic WWI memoir, Testament Of Youth (1933) was recently released.

Alicia Vikander stars as Brittain in the film which is scheduled to open in January in the U.K. (the U.S. date has not yet been set).

Book-to-movie fans will be seeing a lot of Vikander, a Swedish actress, in the future. She has a supporting role in the upcoming Seventh Son (opening Feb. 6, based on Joseph, Delaney’s Revenge of the Witch), stars in Tulip Fever (based on the book by Deborah Moggach, currently filming), and has signed to star in The Light Between Oceans (based on the 2012 best seller by M.L. Stedman), as well as The Danish Girl, (based on the 2002 book by David Ebershoff),

Co-starring is Kit Harington (the heart-throb from Game of Thrones, he will also appear with Vikander in Seventh Son) as Brittain’s fiancé, who dies in the war).

Based on the trailer, released today, Wild, adapted from Cheryl Strayed’s brutally honest memoir is already being called an Ocsar contender.

That may not be such a leap. Wild‘s director, Jean-Marc Vallee did pretty well at the Oscars last year with The Dallas Buyers Club.

It opens Dec. 5th.

Tie-in:

Wild (Movie Tie-in Edition): From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
Cheryl Strayed
RH/Knopf: November 18, 2014
9781101873441, 1101873442
Trade paperback

The second season of Orange Is The New Black was released on NetFlix on June 6th. It may have wandered  from the book, and may not live up to the first season, but it features even more references to other books, so many that Entertainment Weekly was able to create a season 2 reading list of a dozen titles (ranging from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina to John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars).

The memoir’s author, Piper Kerman appeared on the Diane Rehm show recently, to talk about her life since the book and the series and her work for prison reform.

With the airing of the new series, Orange Is The New Black has moved back up best seller lists.

The ABC TV series based on NYC restaurateur Eddie Huang’s memoir, Fresh Off the Boat, (RH/Spiegel & Grau; RH Audio; BOT), has been given the green light for the 2014/2015 season.

Looks like they are sticking with the memoir title for the series. Earlier we reported that the network had changed the title to Far East Orlando, which received protests for being racist from many, including Huang.

Now the original title is getting its own criticism via Twitter.

Trailer below:

We’re always on the look out for reviews that make our mouths water. Laura Miller did it for us yesterday in Salon with her review of Geoff Dyer’s Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H.W. Bush, (RH/Pantheon), a book we neglected to include in our highlights for the week. Not only did she make us want to read that book, but every other book Dyer has written.

As she says, the very concept is brilliant,

The notion of installing a writer of Dyer’s baroquely sensitive and self-conscious temperament aboard an American aircraft carrier stationed in the Persian Gulf is obviously a stroke of genius. In fact, Dyer’s two-week writer-in-residency stint on the USS George H.W. Bush was his own idea…

She wanders off for a paragraph about the book not being what she had expected, a failing of many reviewers, but quickly gets it back on track and offers great stuff for readers advisors to steal.

Jon Stewart’s directorial debut, Rosewater, has been acquired for release in the U.S. by Open Road Films.

The film is based on one of the many books Stewart has featured on the Daily Show, Maziar Bahari’s memoir, Then They Came for Me, (Random House, 2011), about the author’s imprisonment in Iran.

The title comes form the nickname of one of Bahari’s captors. It stars Mexican actor Gael García Bernal, whose previous credits include the role of Che Guevara in The Motorcycle Diaries.

The release date has not yet been announced.

Below, Bahari appears on The Daily Show in 2009, after his release:

The cover story of the new issue of People magazine (on newsstands today) features an excerpt from Michelle Knight’s memoir of  being kidnapped held captive in Cleveland for ten years, a time during which she was brutally raped and tortured by her captor.

Knight was the subject of a  a two-part interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper this week and also appeared on the Dr. Phil show.

Her book, published on Tuesday, is Finding Me: A Decade of Darkness, a Life Reclaimed: A Memoir of the Cleveland Kidnappings (Perseus/Weinstein Books; Recorded Books).

First, there was NYC restaurateur Eddie Huang’s memoir, Fresh Off the Boat, (RH/Spiegel & Grau; RH Audio; BOT), and his beyond-Bourdain TV food series of the same title on Vice’s Munchies Channel, just renewed for its third season. Next, there may be an ABC TV series based on the memoir. The pilot awaits network executive’s decision about whether it will get the greenlight. The title of the pilot, however, was recently changed to “Far East Orlando,” regarded as racist by many, including Huang himself.

The Wall Street Journal‘s “Speak Easy” blog sticks to the original title in “Why the Fresh Off the Boat TV Series Could Change the Game.” Admitting to possible bias, the author, the father of the 10-year-old lead, Jeff Yang, predicts,

The show is like nothing you will have ever seen before on television. If it makes it to air, it will blow minds, raise eyebrows and, to quote a line that my son says as Little Eddie, “change the game.” I would honestly say the same if I weren’t the lead actor’s father. It’s that different. And provocative. And, yes, gut-bustingly funny.

He notes that if it makes it to series, it will be the only Asian American family sitcom since Margaret Cho’s All American Girl  gave hope twenty years ago that “millions of people across the nation might be gathering to watch a show in which they’d be invited into an immigrant Asian household, experiencing our unique issues and aspirations through the humanizing lens of comedy.” 

But first, something has to be done about that title.

Our headline for this story is a bit different from USA Today’s, “Diane Keaton Flirts Like Crazy With Matt Lauer.”

To us, it looks like she knew exactly how to take control of the interview.

It seems to have worked, Keaton’s new memoir, Let’s Just Say It Wasn’t Pretty, (Random House; RH Audio; RH Large Print) rose to #189 on Amazon’s sales rankings.

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The lead book review in People magazine this week (the world’s  50 Most Beatutiful People issue, featuring 12 Years A Slave star Lupita Nyong’o on the cover) is for an unusual memoir. Jason Padgett a “muscled, Mullet-wearing party boy whose most profound thought involved his favorite teams and new dates.” (the New York Post puts it succinctly in their headline, “From Mullet To Math Genius“).

Today, he works with MIT scientists on fractal applications. What caused this huge change? A traumatic  brain injury that seems to have unlocked mathematical talents. People gives 3.5 of 4 stars to his memoir,  Struck by Genius, (HMH; Brilliance Audio), noting that it readers “contemplate the bizarre gifts that might lie within all of us.”

The author appeared on today’s CBS This Morning.

Production has begun on the long-gestating Nick Nolte/Robert Redford adaptation of Bill Bryson’s memoir, A Walk in the Woods, (RH/Broadway; RH Audio, 1998) near Georgia’s Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park, according to the local press.

Bryson’s memoir recounts his misadventures as he attempts to hike the Appalachian Trail, despite “years of waddlesome sloth” with his old pal Katz, a man even more ill-prepared for the effort than he is. Redford will play Bryson and Nolte, Katz (in a role originally planned for Redford’s late friend Paul Newman).

As the anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombing approaches, the Boston Public Library unveils an exhibit, “Dear Boston: Messages from the Marathon Memorial,” which includes items from the a spontaneous memorial that developed in Copley Square

One of the people who was injured in that tragedy, Jeff Bauman, appeared on the Today Show this morning, to talk about his remarkable recovery from losing both his legs and his book, released today, Stronger, (Hachette/Grand Central).

Bauman, will also be featured in a special report on Friday’s NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, “108 Hours: Inside the Hunt for the Boston Marathon Bomber.”

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